Sunday, 16 December 2012

I have been working my way through some Christmas designs and have been really pleased with the results so far!

I think this week's are my favourite that I have done though. I was thinking of Christmas things that could inspire my nail art and I decided that candy canes would look fab. Rather than go for red and white stripes I wanted to take a different approach.

This design was very easy to create, but very messy with watermarbling! I painted three of my nails in Bright Red by Barry M and added my Collection 2000 sparkle top coat. I love the top coat because the glitter is so fine but so pretty.

I painted my ring finger and thumb with a base of white polish, I used Sally Hansen. Leave this to dry and then comes the messy part. To do water marbling you need a cup of room temperature water and your polishes. New polishes work best. You can use as many colours as you like, but you need to work quite quickly. Drip your first polish on the surface of the water, I let a few drips fall to make sure I had enough. The polish will start to spread out on the surface of the water. Then add some drips of your other colour. Then taking a tooth pick draw some swirls or stripes into the polish on the surface of the water. When you are ready bend your finger placing the nail directly down onto your swirled polish, then straighten your finger straight down into the water. You will see that there is polish still on the surface of the water. Before removing your finger you need to get rid of the polish from the surface otherwise you will ruin your design. Blow gently on the polish on the polish on the water, then using your tooth pick swirl it around on the surface and the polish will start to stick to the tooth pick. Once the polish has gone from the surface of the water you can carefully remove your finger from the water. You will have a lot of polish all around your nail and on your finger, which can look a bit scary, but all it takes is a cotton bud dipped into nail polish remover to take it off. To help with this you can also use Vaseline around your nail and on your finger to stop the polish sticking so much.

Repeat those same steps for each watermarbled nail and voila - you have candy cane inspired nails! I finished these nails off, once they were dry and cleaned up, with a coat of the sparkle top coat. What's great about watermarbling is that no two nails look the same so you never really know what you might get.

I hope you like them and maybe try out watermarbling yourself. If you get stuck there are loads of videos on YouTube that will help you out.

Monday, 10 December 2012

My nails have got more Christmassy this week with some festive Christmas plaits. I first saw these plaits (or fish tail) nails a while ago now and tired them when I first saw them as the effect was something quite different from things that I had seen before. But now getting round to Christmas designs I thought I would give them another go in festive colours.

I decided that I wanted to create the plait design on my thumb nail and ring finger,so I painted the other three fingers with silver from Models Own. I had already picked white, red and green to be the colours for the plaited nails. To start off the plaits I painted the nails on each hand with white and left this to dry. Taking my next colour I then painted a diagonal stripe. I again left this to dry. Taking my third colour I made a diagonal stripe in the other direction. Leaving each stripe to dry in between I then just continued down my nail alternating my three different colours until I reached the tip of my nail.

Sunday, 2 December 2012

It's that time of year again. I am feeling Christmasy as the decorations have gone up today - YAY! My nails over the next few weeks will also be festive for the season. I hope you enjoy.

This week as it has been rather frosty and cold I thought I would go with a design that matched the weather. I went with snowflakes on an icy blue background.

The base colour for this design is a gorgeous duck egg colour from Marks and Spencer with Collection 2000 sparkly top coat over the top.﻿ This gives a beautiful base for the design as it looks like a snowy scene. To create the snowflakes I used a dotting tool to make three small lines on each nail in the shape of a star. I then added a dot of polish to the end of each of the lines to make it look like a snowflake. Adding in extra dots makes it look like there is falling snow around each of the snowflakes.

This is a really cute and easy design to try. If you don't have a dotting tool you can use a toothpick to get the same effect.

Check back soon for more Christmas designs - I am already planning some others!